The contango game: How Koch Industries manipulates the oil market for profit

Good piece. It appeared that the public thought Enron was the energy derivatives clown (at least the U.S. energy derivatives clown), and the clown show was over when Enron bellied. Not so, with funnies like the KochClowns roaming the landscape. Over the years, a joke was that when the large banks (JPM, for example) bought supertankers, filled them with crude, and moored them, say, off Gibraltar, that they keyed the market top. That is, they often bought the market top. Players like Koch probably preyed on the lumbering banks, but that’s little comfort to consumers. I suspect that Koch is involved in the pressure on the CFTC to reduce/eliminate margin requirements for end users (that doesn’t mean individual people consumers). When Phil and Wendy Gramm helped unleash the derivatives genie, they weren’t concerned with John Q. Public, that’s for sure.